How To: Slum It

Eat at a corporate chain

What does Average Joe like about themed restaurants like TGI Friday’s? Apparently, just about everything: Applebee’s, TGI Friday’s, and Chili’s are everywhere, and do swift business. Perhaps it’s the state fair feel, the clownish colors, or the irreverent antiques bolted to the walls. Whatever the reasons, no reservations are generally taken, so get your name on the list at the hostess stand.

The menus are exhaustive, and they offer a host of frozen alcoholic drinks with names that try too hard to sound sexy. Your overzealous waiter will be wearing piano key suspenders and a dozen irreverent pins on his work uniform.

At the end of the meal, he will ask you if you have finished eating and if he can clear your plate. Nod a bit, then say with the deluded conviction that it is the finest thing that has ever been said, “Yes. I guess my eyes were bigger than my stomach.”

Go fishing downtown (i.e., off a pier)

Tossing a baited line into a body of water for the sake of sustenance is as old as humankind. But there’s a difference between deep-sea fishing for sport and public pier fishing for daily bread. Some of the folks you’ll run into on the pier will be there to eat; others because they enjoy fishing but are too cheap or too poor to fish somewhere more respectable. Or, at least, somewhere less disgusting.

To that end, throw your line and see what you can catch. With an eye towards relating the story later to friends over blackened Ahi Tuna and a bottle of Pinot Noir, hope that you don’t catch a single fish: reeling in some illegally dumped medical waste will make for hilarious table talk. And if you’re especially lucky, you’ll remove the holy grail of pier slumming: a car tire.

experience the simple life

You may be asking why you would do this to yourself, where the benefit might be in learning how to slum it like a commoner. Well, certainly, walking in another’s shoes (or sneakers, or flip-flops) can help you develop empathy for those less fortunate. Yet if empathy or even some form of benevolence on your part was the greater goal, the activity would wear a name befitting this magnanimity.

Rather, look at it this way: A common refrain among the lower classes is that they enjoy life’s “simple pleasures.” Slumming it serves to remind you that what this really means is that those are all they can afford. Resource:http://en.wikipedia.org